About us
Tour New Zealand with Golf Fanatics & Raconteurs
The drive from Auckland to Te Arai takes ninety minutes. The flight from Auckland to Queenstown, an hour and forty. Inside a single week, a small group of golfers, hosted carefully, can play six of the finest links courses on earth — most of them within sight of the sea, two of them on land that does not, ordinarily, accept visitors.
That is what New Zealand is for golf. That is what Everest is for.
Everest is run by two people: Chris Hunter and Steve Wilkins. We are members at Tara Iti and Royal Auckland, single-figure handicaps from a generation when that still meant something — time on the range, time in the wind, a long apprenticeship before anyone called you good. Between us, we are on first-name terms with most of the head pros in this hemisphere and several in the next. That network is not a marketing asset. It is the actual product.
We host a small number of groups each year. Each one is hand-built around the guests, their handicaps, and the weather. Trips run from four nights to a fortnight. Pricing is on request. None of it is published online. None of it ever repeats.
Chris Hunter
Chris is an accomplished golfer with a current handicap of 3. A former representative golfer from Wellington, New Zealand, he competed in multiple New Zealand Opens during the 1980s.
After enjoying a successful career in the building and construction industry, Chris has returned to competitive golf with impressive results.
In recent years, he represented the exclusive Tara Iti Golf Club at the prestigious Tom Doak- designed Championship held at Rock Creek Cattle Company in Montana. He also competed as an amateur in the New Zealand Open at Millbrook Resort, Queenstown, where he won the Amateur title in 2013 with Michael Long and again in 2019 alongside Australian professional James Nitties. Chris is a member of Tara Iti, The Hills and Royal Auckland Golf Clubs and has played golf at hundreds of the top courses around the world.
STEVE WILKINS
Steve has been passionate about golf since childhood, growing up alongside Paraparaumu Beach Golf Club. He caddied at several New Zealand Opens held at the course, most notably for Grant Waite in his first professional event.
With decades of experience in golf travel, Steve has led over 100 golf tours to the United States and built an extensive network of contacts at many of America’s finest private clubs.An avid collector, he has amassed logo golf balls from more than 350 courses worldwide, including over 200 in the USA. A single-figure handicap golfer for most of his life, Steve is a member of Royal Auckland Golf Club.
In 2002, he played a key role in bringing Tiger Woods to New Zealand. After years of organising bespoke tours for high-net-worth golfers from the United States, Steve is now focusing full-time on curating premium golf experiences with his co-founder, Chris.